Stupid Ideas I Haven't Done: Cop Show

Like everyone, I tend to come up with a lot of ideas that I never get around to doing. Sometimes out of laziness, sometimes because I can’t figure out how to make it work, and sometimes, it’s just because they’re pretty stupid ideas. If anyone wants to make these stupid ideas a reality, more power to you — maybe give a hat-tip to Kittysneezes, why don’t you?

Stupid Idea: OK, I had an idea for something I would like to do. It’s a cop show, like NYPD Blue, where the first season or so is basically really really good as a cop show, like, good characters, intelligent plots and all of that type of stuff. Only about halfway through, the show’d begin to decay — the plots would still be good, but there’d be some aspect that wouldn’t add up. Not, you know, hugely so, but one of those things where you’d finish going “hey, that was pretty good”, and then after thinking about the show, like, maybe a half hour later, you’d go “Hey, wait a minute — they never addressed this/that couldn’t have happened that way…” Basically at this point, the show would still be good and watchable, but people’d come away thinking that the writers were getting tired and were having trouble thinking of such brilliant stuff as the first year or so, but it was still worth watching. After all, maybe they’re working on a movie or something, and it’ll get good again soon. And, anyway, even if it’s not operating at 100%, it’d be at about 90%, and 90% of This Show is like, 300% as good as most anything else anyway.

And then about after that, the decay would end up being really rapid. In the middle of, say, the third season, you’d get an episode where the first 40 or so minutes are a standard Murder Cop Show Mystery Thing with the hardboiled detectives going and getting clues and everything and dealing with all sorts of everyday things and red herrings and whatever, you know, just like every sort of Murder Cop Mystery Show Thing. And then at about the last 10 minutes or so, the two detectives would have this conversation:

“We’re getting close, I can feel it.”“Yeah, I know what you mean…”“Hey, wait… I think I know where we can find our perp!”“…”“TO THE MOON!!!!”“LET’S GO!!!!!”and then they’d cut to the detectives bouncing on the moon for the last ten minutes to banjo music. At the very end, they’d bounce into a cave, and they’d see a 4 year old, and they’d go “LOOK! IT IS THE MURDERER!!!!” and the 4-year-old would go “I SOOWWY!!!!” and they’d go “THAT’S OK!!!!! DO YOU WANT AN ICE CREAM!!!!!!!” and they’d give the kid a vanilla ice-cream cone, but he’d go to eat it and it’d mash all over his space helmet and the kid’d get all sad, but the cops’d laugh because after all, he’s a goddamn murderer.

I think a later episode would just be some victim screaming for 50 minutes. And at the very end, the cops would arrest him. For basically no reason. They’d just haul him off and the last shot would be him, no longer screaming and perfectly calm and happy being driven away in the back seat, waving to the audience out the back window.